Bush Ignores Facts That Support Right To Choose

A remarkable thing happened during the eight years in which the United States was led by a president who unashamedly endorsed abortion rights. The abortion rate dropped dramatically.

It is not at all likely that our new president, George W. Bush, can figure out what to make of this. In any case, he will not let the facts get in the way of his politics.

Bush used his first day of work in the Oval Office to stroke the anti-abortion activists who turned up in Washington, as usual, to mark the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

He was cowardly, like his father before him, and declined to address the protesters in person. The cameras would be there to record the scene and so Bush's abortion position -- he is ardently opposed and wants to outlaw it -- would not be so easy to fudge. Anyway, he sent his message to the protesters through the fervent Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.

But what he did was more powerful than what he said. Bush re-imposed a gag rule that prohibits international aid groups that receive U.S. funds from using their own private money to perform abortions or even speak out in favor of their being safe and legal.

"It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion, either here or abroad," Bush said in a written statement.

In fact, no American funds are used for abortion overseas -- not to perform them and not to promote them. They have not been since a 1973 ban.

Still, the people who want to keep women in Africa and Latin America and Asia from having access to safe abortion insist that curbing free speech will curb abortion.

The facts, those nagging facts, tell a different story.

Since 1985, the first year after Ronald Reagan's "Mexico City" gag rule barring funds from groups that lobby for legal abortion abroad went into effect (this is the rule Bush reinstated), there has been a worldwide trend toward liberalization of abortion laws. Poland and El Salvador have tightened restrictions. About 10 times as many nations have gone in the other direction.

In every corner of the globe, on continents where rural women end pregnancy with ancient rites of sisterhood and on continents where abortion is as private -- and as safe -- as taking a pill, abortion rights have expanded, not contracted.

And here is what has happened around the world as abortions have become more legal, more safe and more acceptable: Fewer women are having them.

It is another inconvenient fact, but there it is. Women around the world aren't having more abortions just because abortion is more available. They are having fewer abortions, mostly, public health officials say, because they are using better birth control and using it more regularly.

The decline in the abortion rate in Western Europe also came at the same time mifepristone, the abortion pill Bush opposes, became available. The abortion pill did not increase abortions, as Bush claims.

And it is not unsafe. For a dozen years it has been used without side effects any more devastating than cramps and nausea.

Still, Bush's choice for Health and Human Services secretary, Tommy Thompson, said he intends to review the FDA's recent approval of the drug for use in the United States. "The safety of it, as I understand it, is in question," he testified on Capitol Hill.

Thompson could not, however, name any specific risks that concern him.

Reality is often hard to reconcile with political rhetoric. The gap is cavernous when it comes to abortion, and it always has been.

For years we have been told that if only abortion were restricted as much as possible, in as many ways imaginable, it would surely decline. Now it has declined, under policies the opposite of those the anti-abortion protesters picket and shout and march to demand.

The world's women have risen above this incendiary conflict and made a separate peace. They have chosen to take control of their lives and to change their own governments. They have taken advantage of advances in birth control, and public health generally, to claim their bodies for themselves.

But this does not dim the zealotry of the anti-abortion forces. Because this has always been their greatest fear.